The First Patient

CHAPTER 10

Midnight came and went. By 2:00 A.M., when Gabe decided it was safe to leave, the president had been sleeping soundly for an hour and a half. At Lattimore's request, Gabe watched from a distance as the military aide carrying The Football was dismissed. Then Gabe gathered his things, including two books on presidential illness, succession, and the Twenty-fifth Amendment.

He was about to notify Treat Griswold he was leaving when Carol Stoddard knocked softly on the open door. She had removed her makeup and changed into pajamas and a robe but still looked no less elegant than she had in her evening dress. Her doe's eyes were slightly reddened, leading Gabe to suspect she had been crying.

"Ready to leave?" she asked, taking a step into the room.

"I think it's safe. No matter what, I'm just a mile or so away."

"He'll be all right, I think-at least for now. Do you know what you're going to do about all this?"

"I need a little time-maybe just until later this morning."

"Gabe, the job is taking a heavy toll on him-on us. Heavier than either of us imagined, I think. Drew's been working seven-day weeks, often as many as sixteen, even twenty hours a day. We hardly ever go to sleep at the same time and… and our personal life has dwindled until… well… until there just isn't much of it left."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Gabe, I'm begging you, if you think for the sake of his health Drew should drop out of the campaign and let Tom Cooper take over, please tell him. He thinks he can be all things to all people. But someone has to help him see that nobody can-not even him."

Tears began to well in Carol's eyes. Gabe hesitated, then crossed to her and held her quietly until her composure returned.

"Whatever I decide will be what's best for my patient," he said finally.

"I understand. Maybe you can convince him to just cut down-take a nonworking vacation, spend more time with me and the boys, spend some time each day doing nothing, accept the fact that everyone has limits."

"I'll try, Carol. Really I will."

"Thank you. Thank you so much for what you're doing. I'll send Treat Griswold over to walk you out."

Before Gabe could respond, the First Lady was gone. He flashed on the envy he had felt when he arrived in D.C. and first saw her and Drew together-the perfect, beautiful First Couple, leading the country together into a cultural, political, and social renaissance. Now he reflected on one of many wise observations by his original AA sponsor-this one dealing with the dangers inherent in going through life comparing your insides to everyone else's outsides.

He took the elevator down to the first floor, where he identified the tubes of blood he had drawn by using his Tyler phone number in reverse and set them in the small refrigerator in the clinic.

One fascinating vignette he had come across in his reading involved President Bill Clinton's knee injury and subsequent surgery. The president was on a golfing vacation in Florida when his knee buckled while he was walking down a short flight of stairs. His quadriceps muscle had torn in two and snapped off the patellar tendon. A White House Medical Unit physician, on duty nearby, immobilized the leg and arranged for immediate transportation to the nearest hospital. Already waiting there was Clinton's personal physician, who, as usual, was part of the medical team caring for the chief executive when he was away from the White House. From that moment until Clinton's surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, and even after the muscle and tendon repair was completed, his physician had two major decisions to make-pain control and anesthesia.

Never far from Clinton throughout the ordeal was the military aide bearing the codes for unleashing nuclear missiles as well as an agreement forged between Clinton and Vice President Al Gore regarding situations in which the reins of government would be turned over to Gore.

Together, Clinton and his doctor decided that the only pain medication he would receive would be anti-inflammatories with no central nervous system effects. In addition, with the approval of the orthopedic surgeons at Bethesda Naval, he would receive epidural anesthesia, and so would be awake and alert throughout his surgery. The two-hour procedure and Clinton's recovery went off without a hitch.

In print it all sounded so straightforward, so simple. Gabe wondered how Clinton's personal physician would have handled a situation like the one he was enduring now. It seemed doubtful that if Drew Stoddard had a doc other than his friend and college roommate he would still be president. Then Gabe remembered that, in fact, until just a couple of weeks ago, Stoddard did have a different doc and he was still the president. Gabe also realized that at no point had he been told the precise nature of the agreement between Stoddard and Thomas Cooper III.

Because of the large number of dignitaries attending the state dinner, the Navy captain who was covering the medical office had elected to stay in-house. Gabe dropped off his medical bag and gave the man the line Lattimore and he had concocted and disseminated first to the dinner guests, then to the press, that the president had been seized by a combination of his asthma, migraine, and severe gastroenteritis and had specifically asked his personal physician to attend to him until the attacks were resolved.

More lies.

Edgy and uncertain about the decisions he had made throughout the night, medical and political, Gabe allowed Treat Griswold to accompany him down the elevator and out of the White House to the senior staff parking area on West Executive Boulevard. The Eighteen Acres, as the White House compound was known, was eerily quiet. The two of them made the trip in pensive silence, bound by the enormity of the drama in which they each had played a part.

Bull-necked Griswold, a loyal veteran of many years in the Secret Service, had signed on to take a bullet for Andrew Stoddard if necessary. Was the man raving incomprehensibly and rocking as if trying to shake demons from his mind a person he would want to die for? Gabe wanted to ask that question of the agent but knew he never would.

If they only knew, Gabe was thinking. The press, the cabinet, the Congress, the Chinese, the Israelis, the Arabs, the terrorists, the American people-if they only knew what had transpired this night in the presidential residence.

He wondered about those men who had preceded Drew Stoddard into the presidency. How many secrets had been kept on their behalf? How many lies had been told?

"You gonna be all right?" Griswold asked as they reached Gabe's car.

"Thanks for caring, Griz. Yeah, I think I'll be okay. I'm assuming you know most of what went on in there."

"I know as much as I need to know," the agent said. "He's a very special man, Doctor. We should do what we can to keep him around."

"I hear you. I'm not a hundred percent certain I agree with you, but I hear you."

"We've all got to do what we've got to do. Take care, sir. At the moment I don't envy you."

Gabe patted Griswold's massive shoulder. It was like patting a boulder.

"At the moment I don't blame you. Listen, let's not forget about taking that ride in the desert someday."

"I won't. Good luck, sir."

Griswold retreated the way they had come, leaving Gabe alone in the quiet.

The silver Buick Riviera Gabe was driving was, like his furnished four-room suite in the Watergate Apartments, an open-ended loan from LeMar Stoddard. The First Father wouldn't have it any other way. From the day Drew and Gabe came together at the Academy, the senior Stoddard had embraced Gabe and his parents as family, inviting them to his North Carolina estate as well as to his Virginia hunting lodge. Even though the accident and Gabe's subsequent expulsion from school and imprisonment proved more than Buzz Singleton could handle, LeMar had remained a dependable friend and supporter, providing him with a top-notch defense team and visiting him more than once at MCI. Years later, LeMar even pulled some strings to make sure Gabe's past didn't keep him from being accepted into medical school.

Gabe started the Buick and for a few minutes simply sat behind the wheel, letting the air-conditioning get up to speed and continuing the process of sorting out his thoughts and feelings. Over the years, when faced with a medical puzzle, he tried to keep all diagnostic possibilities in play until they were weeded out by either a negative lab test, a positive lab test, or a new physical finding. But always he had an early suspicion as to where the answer lay. The trick was not to be ruled or even influenced by that suspicion until the weeding out had left little, or better still no, choice.

"He's a very special man… We should do what we can to keep him around."

With Griswold's words reverberating in his head, Gabe pulled out of the White House compound onto Sixteenth Street and then made his way to G Street for the mile-long drive to the Watergate Complex. The night was thickly overcast, warm, and humid, even for August in D.C. Essentially lost in thoughts about the evening just past, Gabe rolled along with the languid early morning traffic. As he stopped at a red light at Twenty-second Street, the dark sedan that had been following him since he left the compound pulled into the empty lane to his left and drew up precisely even with him.

What happened then was nothing but a blur.

Aware only of slight movement in the car next to him, Gabe turned his head to the left. The driver of the other car, his face obscured by a baseball cap pulled low, and by dense shadow, had opened his passenger window and had raised a large handgun, pointing the menacing barrel straight at Gabe's face from a distance of no more than five or six feet. An instant before the killer fired, Gabe's car was struck firmly from behind, sending it forward several feet.

With the muzzle flash etched into his vision and the shot ringing in his ears, Gabe's head snapped back. The rear side window of the Buick spiderwebbed from the errant bullet. There was no second shot. Instead, tires screeching amid the smoke and stench of burning rubber, the sedan vaulted forward, spun on two wheels onto Twenty-second, and disappeared.

Still unable to piece together exactly what had happened, Gabe was limp, held in place by his seat belt, gasping for air and for composure.

No time. There had been no time even to react. A man had just tried to kill him!

From somewhere behind him a car door opened and closed. Then there were rapid footsteps, and seconds later his own car door flew open.

"Are you all right?"

The voice was familiar.

It took a moment for Gabe's vision to clear.

Standing there, looking down at him with undisguised concern, was Alison Cromartie.